Microsoft 2012 R2 Terminal Services on ESXi5.5 best practice

[ditro2001]

Hello all,

I've got a few Microsoft 2012 R2 Terminal Services installations on a vmware esxi5.5 cluster outside.

The users complains that the performance is poor. Not the overall performance - the image buildup, browsing in websites etc.

The performance of windows databases etc is great.

all tips I found is to use the 2012 rds on a hyper-v host with remote-fx.

There must be a way to get great performance with vmware.

kind regards

Dennis

[Linjo]

Check the power settings in bios, set it to "high performance" or similar.

[Wh33ly]

One simple thing that helped me improve sluggish like RDP in 2012 was to simply disable the shadow of the mouse pointer

Go to the “control panel” and open “System”

Open “Advanced system settings and then click the “Settings” button at the performance field. In the tab “Visual effects” you see an option “Show shadows under mouse pointer”. After disabling this, the performance of the mouse was back to normal again.

I also decided to set the settings to “Adjust for best performance”.

Also have a look at the Microsoft Tuning Guidelines

Performance Tuning Guidelines for previous versions of Windows Server

In 2012 guide there is a section Performance Tuning for Remote Desktop Session Host (Formerly Terminal Server) you might look into.

[DanielOlofsson]

Well you have to investigate what bottlenecks you have.

CPU? Is the CPU-load ok on the RDS-servers? How about the CPU-load on the ESXi-hosts? Average CPU-wait?
GPU? What applications are running slow? Do they need much GPU-power ie. CAD-application? Maybe you need a proper graphics- or CAD-adapter to offload the CPU?
Memory? Is it full? Can more be allocated? Enough physical memory on the hosts?
Networking? Is the network sufficient all the way from the server to the client? 100Mbit/s all the way? 1Gbit/s? Are they connecting through LAN or WAN?
Underlaying storage (ie SAN)? Latencies and IOPS ok?

Could you please elaborate "image buildup?" Is it when you for ie visit a webpage the image renders slow? Or is it when you edit images with Photoshop or similar?
And the same for Windows databases? Is it SQL-database queries that runs fast or what do you mean?

Is VMware-tools installed?

I am running a few RDS-servers (WS2012) on ESXi 5.5. However not with full desktops, only using applications published through RemoteApp and we do not experience bad performance. It really depends on what software you are running, your hardware and your setup.

[ditro2001]

The CPU load seems to be ok.
I have not checked the average CPU-wait so far.

We use normal desktop allpications. Office, Internet Browsers, SAP.

Do you have experience in using a GPU for windows 2012 terminal servers.

Are you using remotefx?

Could you please elaborate "image buildup?" Is it when you for ie visit a webpage the image renders slow?

-> Yes Website render really slow. Just block for block.

[DanielOlofsson]

We use normal desktop allpications. Office, Internet Browsers, SAP.

This is not GPU-consuming software... We do not use any Internet browser in the RDS but I tried to publish it in my test environment and surfed the web. No issues with images. I even tried streaming through Youtube. Works pretty ok.

Do you have experience in using a GPU for windows 2012 terminal servers.

Are you using remotefx?

Nope but there is a lot of threads about this. If you need this for you software, which I doubt, remember to check the HCL if passthrough is supported.

Yes Website render really slow. Just block for block.

This is weird. I had no problems at all.
What is your network speed to you RDS-servers? Could you try to transfer some files to and from your RDS? Which speed do you get?

[BrandonCannan]

If the user is seeing poor performance when using RDP, make the following changes:

On the client side group policy:

Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Admin Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Connection Client > Turn off UDP on Client = Enabled

On the server group policy:

Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Connections > Select RDP transport protocol = Use only TCP